Cloud Imperium developer Ben Parry initially responded to the question in the negative. "Not in the slightest", he wrote. "I expect, if we use it, it'll be a massive headache and time-sink but might give us some subtle improvements in looks or performance if we get it right."

He followed up by clarifying exactly what he means by headache: "The added headache is that whatever we offered would have to be an "as well" feature rather than an "instead", developing a feature for a single manufacturer's top-end cards means also maintaining feature parity for everyone else's hardware.

"Personally I'd like to use it to make the shadows crispier."

There you have it. On the of chance ray tracing does get added to Star Citizen it'll slow down development even more, and the improvements will be slight.